Greenwich Revisited: One Hundred Summers Later

Ilse Gordon will be the next featured artist in the Greenwich Historical Society’s Community Artists Series. Ms. Gordon moved to Cos Cob 20 years ago and immediately became enamored with the local landscape. Early on, she painted a view of the Cos Cob railroad bridge, depicting the scene in blustery autumn. She later learned that one hundred years before, artists Elmer Livingston MacRae, Childe Hassam, and John Henry Twachtman (all major figures in American Impressionist art who stayed and worked at the current site of the Greenwich Historical Society) had also documented the life, light and sights of the region. Seeking to walk in their footsteps, Ms. Gordon sets her paintings in lush gardens and along local shores, and reinterprets these artists’ visions, incorporating European Impressionist, Japanese and graphic influences in her work. Her varied subject matter chronicles the passage of time, the few remaining farms in town, the ever-changing movement at Greenwich Point, and the course of the sun in its infinitely subtle gradations of shadow and light.